Environmental and social activism in Uganda is growing thanks to the use of ICTs, particularly the SMS to mobilise, disseminate and alert individuals about policies that are likely to affect them badly.

In the past three or four weeks, the Ugandan government has been embroiled in a situation where awarding an investor a portion of Mabira Forest to address sugar shortages in the country and perhaps the region is becoming a hard nut to crack.

If one would borrow the term, the use of ICT has gone into overdrive, as a good number of innovations cementing real concrete results begin manifesting themselves.

Although the ground is still the bottom line and the sky the limit, the use of mobile phones has reinforced initiatives in areas that were particularly averse to the use of any modern ICT as one of the ways of getting the much needed information.

This is a long overdue blog entry on the CGIAR's first-ever Forum for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) at its recent Annual General Meeting in Washington, DC and forum follow-up. I am writing about it as Bellanet played a role in its implementation by developing the agenda with the CG Secretariat and Simone Staiger of CIAT.

November 21-22, 2006, (long overdue blog entry!) I attended a "double feature" conference hosted by the UN in New York: UN's new initiative GAID (Global Alliance for ICT and Development) partnered with AIT Global for the first day and the 3rd Web4Dev conference took up the next 1.5 days.

I'm meant to understand this is the seventh World Social Forum (WSF) but the first one of its kind to be held on the African continent - here in Nairobi, Kenya.

From January 21 to 25, delegates from all over the world have been congregating in Nairobi to hammer out and demonstrate against policies, tendencies or call them practices, which pit the world, particularly Africa into abject poverty.

Whenever I participate in any ICT events in South Asia, there is
majority of male participants. I just used to feel awkward sometimes
barking on gender issues being only one female participant in a room.
With the passing time, I have gained enough courage to stop men saying
that "gender is not issue of joke". Deep in my heart, I wished there
were more women supporting my cause of respecting women. I discussed my
feelings with different team members within SAP International and
Bellanet. They encouraged us to initiated process of exploring women

According to a survey from Internet security vendor Postini, spam traffic increased by 59% from September to November. That explained why Dgroups/Lyris did not function properly early this month. Usually there were 10,000 to 15,000 incoming messages each day before November, and it went up to 30,000 to 37,000. Such a volume killed Lyris. The poor Lyris used up all its energy to deal with incoming messages and slowed down other stuff.